Talk:Inside Macintosh

Skip to table of contents

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Inside Macintosh article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Which Year did the Mac start to Speak?[edit]

What was the year that the Macintosh finally came with speech synthesis software as part of its firmware, or a speech synthesizing chip routinely integrated into its hardware makeup? The Amiga had a little bit of speech capability in 1985/1986.

The Amiga's was similar to the Mac's in that time frame - third party software speech synthesis. It wasn't actually built into the Mac's system software until, I believe, the "AV" Macs, like the Quadra 840AV, which had a DSP chip on the motherboard. The first Power Macs, the 6100/7100/8100, had speech synthesis and recognition as a prominent feature. Tempshill 10:33, 26 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The early Macs implemented Speech Synthesis using an 'INIT' extension called MacinTalk. I'm not sure when this was first available, but the Mac Plus certainly had it on its release in '85. However the original Mac 128K introduction appears t0 show the Mac "speaking" so it may well go back to the original Mac if that demo wasn't faked. 60.229.43.17 (talk) 12:45, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"MacinTalk" was part of the system software from day 1: the original Mac introduced itself on stage, January 24, 1984. It was kind of a pain to use for a while, though.

Caroline Rose[edit]

The lead writer and editor of Inside Mac was Caroline Rose, and if someone can find the citation, there was an interesting interview with the coders, stating that the way the original Mac APIs were developed is that the programmers wrote them, then Caroline Rose tried to document them, and this led to extensive revision of the APIs as, apparently, she raised many questions: Why isn't this a pointer? What happens if that data structure doesn't exist yet? Why is this impossible to explain? This article would be the place to put anything we can find about this interesting process. Tempshill 10:33, 26 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Folklore.org has some stories, like "Inside Macintosh". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.185.161.246 (talk) 19:35, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Availability on CD[edit]

"Apple developers can still receive online documentation as part of the developer CDs."

This is no longer true in 2013, I assume? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.185.161.246 (talk) 19:45, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]